


Night Watchman

by bagog



Series: New Skill Set [4]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 02:06:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18202037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagog/pseuds/bagog
Summary: Kaidan and Shepard's son is having his first birthday party, and some of the dadly duties fall to Shepard.





	Night Watchman

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Estalfaed for encouraging me to post.

Shepard frowned.

“No, those definitely aren’t marshmallows,” he glowered at a bag of Skyllian _ruza_ puffs the grocer had placed on the counter. “They’re… they’re like pillows made of sugar. Uh, sweet… they’re sort of… cylindrical and squat. You know, you can probably just look this up on the extranet.”

The shopkeeper blinked at him slowly, large, impassive salarian eyes scanning over the puffs one more time.

“Look, this place doesn’t specialize in _human_ delicacies—“

“It’s not a delicacy it’s more of a—“

“—so if you want to get your fancy marshmelons you’ll have to go somewhere  else.”

“But I don’t have time to get all the way out to Bachjret ward before my kid’s birthday party starts.”

The shopkeeper smiled for a moment.

“Oh, well if it’s for a _birthday party_ , why didn’t you just _say so.”_ He frowned. “We _still_ don’t have any marshmelons. Now if you’ll step aside please, you’re holding up the line.”

Shepard was kicking himself. Today was Shaun’s birthday, and it would be the first time he was having his birthday on-the-day, in their Citadel apartment. Shepard didn’t necessarily understand why it was such a big deal, but Kaidan seemed to make a lot of it, and that meant Shaun did, too. Normally, Shaun would have one or two friends over for dinner and cake whenever they were next on the Citadel, but this year, he had asked for a ‘real party’—a sleepover and everything.

All Shaun’s friends would be over—the house would be packed with kids. Honestly, it made Shepard a little uneasy to think about. But it was for Shaun, so he would do it, he had to do it. What a difference the years made, the idea of being nervous about a child’s birthday party—when he had executed so many war campaigns without his temper failing at all—was nothing short of ridiculous.

But a lot had changed. He used to wake on his stiff mattress a minute before his alarm, dress and rush down to the CIC, conversing with EDI the whole way about their situation. How far until the next relay. What the situation was with Earth. Any messages from the Citadel Council.

This morning, he woke up 30 minutes after his alarm went off, to the sound of Kaidan singing at the bathroom sink and his son bounding up the stairs to tell him about the new high-score he made on _STG Street Fight: 4._

Kaidan had done most of the planning for the upcoming party, and Shepard trusted him the way only a former commanding officer could trust his husband. But it was nagging Shepard that he hadn’t done more to help.

“You’ve never had a birthday party, Shepard.” Kaidan had laughed, “You’ve never _been_ to one either. Don’t worry about it, you’ll do great.”

But, at the threshold of the shower, an idea had struck Shepard: marshmallows. Toasting marshmallows was a thing people did when they wanted to bond. _That_ would surely be suitable for a birthday party. He hadn’t bothered showering at all, throwing his pants and hoodie back on in a flurry and letting Kaidan know he’d be gone for a few hours to buy some last minute supplies.

Three grocers on the Silversun Strip had turned him down, and now Shepard was practically tearing out his hair trying to think of where else to go, not to mention his hip was killing him from all the walking. At last he found them, of all places at the Casino bar—his last-ditch effort.

Shepard got back to the apartment and found Shaun still playing STG: Street Fight 4. He made his way upstairs and heard Kaidan getting out of the shower. He knocked once on the door and peaked his head in.

“I’m back.”

“Come in. I started to wonder if something had happened to you,” Kaidan smiled. It was a veiled smile, though, as it hadn’t been so long ago that the same could be said with a straight face. It had been months after the accident before Kaidan let Shepard go anywhere without him, and it had been years before he stopped worrying. Shepard was sure that, in his own way, Kaidan still worried. That was just what Kaidan did.

“Turns out finding marshmallows on the Citadel is harder than I thought.” He leaned back against the wall, the slight steam mist on the tile soaking into his hoodie. He watched Kaidan shave his face smooth, the stubble itself as much a steely gray these days as the deep black it had been when they married. In nothing but a towel, Kaidan was still a revelation to Shepard: a bead of water running down the line of his chest, his taut stomach and the trail of dark hairs that disappeared beneath the towel wrapped around his waist.

“See something you like, Shepard?” Kaidan smirked at him, eyeing him out of the corner of his eyes.

“I do.” Shepard pushed himself up, walked behind Kaidan and placed his hands on his hips, moist skin beneath his finger tips and the smell of Kaidan’s soap taking over his senses. “How much time do we have?”

“Before the kids get here? Less than I’d like.” Kaidan pushed back against Shepard, leaning forward with a smile when Shepard placed a gentle kiss against the back of his neck. He turned, pulling his towel loose and using the corner to wipe the remaining shaving cream from his face. It was seductive, and Shepard suddenly forgot all about the pain in his hip.

“Well, damn.” He leaned forward and met Kaidan in a kiss, pulled Kaidan in closer till he could feel him through the towel. Pulling away, Kaidan lightly pushed him back, giving a rusty laugh that melted Shepard.

“Hold that thought until after the 10 screaming kids leave our house, okay?” He wrapped the towel back around his waist and took Shepard’s hand, leading him out of the bathroom and down the hall to their bathroom.

“Mm, can do.” Shepard looked down into the living room, seeing Shaun still absorbed in his show. “Maybe I can join you in the shower next time?”

“Maybe we can take a bath?” Kaidan chuckled. He removed his towel again once their bedroom door was closed and ran it through his hair. Shepard always cherished the moments he could see Kaidan’s hair mussed out of place. “I think the s’mores are a really good idea, Shepard.” Kaidan said at last.

“Hm?”

“I mean it. Getting those marshmallows, that’s going to be real special. Good thinking.”

Kaidan was always complimenting Shepard on his parenting, and if he was a little honest, Shepard usually didn’t believe him when he said things like this. Parenting was effortless to Kaidan, saying just the right thing to his son or to his husband to solve the situation, make the day, whatever needed doing. Kaidan was a kind soul, and that was part of the reason he was Shepard’s biggest cheerleader when it came to raising their son.

“Thanks,” Shepard muttered, watching Kaidan walk into their bathroom to fix his hair. Maybe it was worth believing Kaidan, this time around. He had promised he would try.

 

Not much later, the kids were piling in until the whole downstairs seemed a blur of running tiny turians, humans, and quarians. Kaidan somehow wrangled all of them together to help with baking the two cakes for Shaun’s birthday.

Shepard sat back and watched, enthralled at how easily Kaidan got all the kids to work together to bake two, honestly not-so-bad-looking cakes. Shepard ordered some pizzas while the kids ‘worked’. Once the cakes were cooling, Kaidan put on one of Shaun’s favorite movies, and the kids scrambled out of the kitchen to watch.

 “You nervous about tonight?” Kaidan picked a pepperoni off the discarded pizza.

“No, not at all,” Shepard lied.

“Liar.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“It’s fun to make you squirm, sometimes.” Kaidan leaned over and kissed Shepard’s cheek before helping himself to another pepperoni.

Kaidan had an early meeting tomorrow morning, meaning Shepard had late-night Dad duties to attend to. In a lot of ways, Shepard knew he should view this as a victory. It wasn’t too many years ago that Shaun was warned to never wake his Papa up if he was sleeping because of the way Shepard would jolt awake, throwing fists and kicking his feet.

Now he would be sleeping downstairs with the kids—or _trying_ to sleep, anyway—the chief Dad on duty.

“I can stay up,” Kaidan provided. “You can sleep in our bed, I’ll stay down with the kiddos.”

“No, you’ll be exhausted tomorrow. I have time to take a nap.”

“Won’t be the first sleepless night I’ve had in this job. Part of what I signed up for as a dad.”

“Part of what _I_ signed up for, too.” It came out a little more forceful than Shepard had wanted to. Kaidan stopped chewing and came around the counter to stand next to Shepard, an arm snaking around his waist.

“But since then, a lot of stuff has happened you _didn’t_ sign up for.”

The Big Accident. It had stolen a lot from Shepard. It felt trivial to call it the term they used to talk about it with Shaun. ‘Total Implant Rejection’ almost sounded sinister enough to encompass what it had done to Shepard when Shaun was just two years old.

“I’ve got this.” Shepard laid his head on Kaidan’s shoulder. “I want to do this for him. For you too. And for me.”

“Alright.” Kaidan pulled him closer. “Good.”

**++**

The only light in the room was the fireplace, crackling away merrily in the main room. All the tables, chairs, and couches had been pushed to the edges of the room to make space for everyone’s sleeping bags, but all the kids, pajama-clad, were huddled around Shepard. Their faces looked awestruck in the firelight as he opened a pack of marshmallows.

He showed them how to carefully skewer the marshmallow on the thin, metal roasters. He toasted a marshmallow to a perfect golden brown. He felt strangely proud of that marshmallow for some reason. Shepard was not always a patient man, and he could imagine Kaidan downstairs right now teasing him about setting a marshmallow on fire while his own marshmallow was perfect. He looked up and noticed the light was still on underneath their bedroom door.

Shepard prepared the s’more and handed it to Shaun, his eyes huge in the firelight as he bit into the treat.

“Ow ow ow!” Shaun cried out. “It’s hot!”

“It was just in the fire, son,” Shepard chuckled.

Pretty soon all the kids were roasting marshmallows, none of them with the patience to produce anything but a black and charred marshmallow on a s’more that was mostly chocolate.

Their sticky faces smiling, the kids began to roll out their sleeping bags.

“Hey, let’s tell scary stories!” Shaun exclaimed. The kids were on board immediately, and there was the awkward moment as they looked around for the first person to say something.

“My momma told me once, on the flotilla,” Tila began, her modified voice clearly trying to sound spooky. “She had a good friend named Varya. Varya and her used to play around in the ducts on their ship. Their parents warned them not to, because the _kalag_ had been spotted in one of the other ships…”

“What’s a _kalag_?” One of the turian boys asked.

“A _kalag_ is a horrible beast with two heads. It can survive in space and jumps ship to ship in the flotilla. It can sound like anyone—your mom or your dad or you best friend. My mom says it hides in the ducts of older ships, that’s why you should never play in the ducts.

“When she was my age, she lost her friend Varya around a corner in the ducts and then she heard a _scream!_ ” She raised her arms, the fire light casting eerie shadows on her face. “She went around the corner and found Varya’s mask— _cracked!_ and _bloody!_ ”

The room gasped and at least a few of the kids burrowed into their sleeping bags.

“But _then,_ she heard Varya’s voice, as if nothing had happened, saying ‘Come on! Come further! Just around the next corner!’ So she got out of there right away. And they never found Varya’s body!”

“Is that true?” Shaun hissed, aghast.

Tila nodded her head definitively.

“My mom told me.”

Everyone was deathly quiet and Shepard began to wonder if it had been a good idea to let the kids tell scary stories. He looked up, the light was off in his bedroom. Had to mean it was after ten, if Kaidan was going to bed.

“Anybody else got a story?” Shepard asked the kids.

They heard a few more stories that night, something about a haunted wheel that seemed to make all the kids ‘ooo’ and ‘aaah’. There were a couple more that were clearly the efforts of a young mind trying to improvise a spooky story, and the kids reacted to these with varying degrees of skepticism and terror.

When the number of yawns started to outnumber the number of gasps, Shepard spoke up.

“Alright everybody, I think it’s about time we all get some sleep, huh?”

Shaun looked up at him and leaned in to whisper.

“Are you gonna sleep too, Papa?”

“I’ll be _fine_ , kiddo. Stop worrying about me, you sound like your dad.”

Everyone settled into their sleeping bags and Shepard switched off the fireplace, closed the blinds. He marveled at how well they seemed to cut out the noise of speeding cars. The whole living room was quiet as a tomb, except for the occasional rustling of one of the kids.

He was nodding off in his chair when there was a sudden noise. A moan from where one of the turian boys was lying, right by Shaun.

Shepard heard a small whimper from the corner of the living room, over where Alan… maybe his name was Alex… was sleeping.

“What was that?” Tila said, closer to where Shepard was sitting.

“It’s the _kalag!_ ” Shaun hissed. Suddenly, Shepard was dealing with a whole room of terrified children, absolutely confident that they were about to be devoured by a space-beast from quarian legend.

“Shh,” Shepard didn’t like how much exasperation he could hear in his own shushing. “It’s going to be okay, there’s no _klag_ here.”

“ _Kalag!”_ moaned Tila.

“Um, yes. Not one of those, either.” Shepard was pretty sure one of the kids was crying now, and he cursed himself for having ever turned off the fireplace—it was _obviously_ too dark in here for a bunch of scared kids. He stood up, “Alright, everyone calm down, I’m going to turn on the fireplace again so we have a little light.”

Shepard turned the fireplace back on and turned around, seeing a multitude of shining, tear-filled eyes in the dark. The kids all scrambled to get closer to the firelight.

“I miss my mom,” choked one little voice wrapped up in a sleeping bag.

His stomach fell. Of course, Kaidan had gone to bed and Shepard was about to have a whole birthday party of kids terrified and homesick. He tried to think about what Kaidan would do—normally it was so easy for him to imagine, even if it wasn’t always easy to do. There was a strange kind of panic that came with his present circumstances that he wasn’t used to. He had fought Reapers and geth and krogans and mercenaries, and at that particular moment, he’d rather be fighting them.

But he had signed on to be a dad, now. Kaidan kept trying to tell him he could be good at that, too. He felt as scared as the kids huddling around him, and for a moment if brought a surge of terror into his chest. He had felt the kind of raw, primal and childish fear of being afraid of a _kalag_ —the rachni, the Reapers. These days, things were not so simple. He was afraid of losing Kaidan. Losing Shaun. Of not being able to be there for his son, and now here he was, all alone and unable to do anything.

Couldn’t be as scared as the kids, though, even if it was a different kind of fear.

“Everyone come here.” Shepard sat down on the floor, back against the hearth. Shaun climbed into his lap and Shepard held him close. He waited till all the little faces had migrated over to his side of the room, dragging their sleeping bags with them. “Now, everyone just close your eyes. I’m here, okay?”

There were a few whimpers around the room, Shepard felt a small thrill when Shaun immediately closed his eyes and buried his face in Shepard’s shoulder.

“Come on now,” he said again, giving the kids a big smile. “Let’s all go to sleep, okay?”

“I’m scared,” came a reply from the back of the little group.

“Here’s what I… um, what I do when I get scared.” He swallowed. His voice shook a bit, he began to sing.

_“Tell the stars to sleep, put out the moon._  
Hush the trees that rustle in the wood  
Tell the one I love I’ll be sleeping soon.  
Tell the one I love I will see him soon.”

It was an old lullaby. Shepard didn’t know how he knew it. He never remembered his parents, and couldn’t believe they were the kind to sing their baby to sleep with a lullaby. In the Reds, he would sing it in his head whenever he got scared. Come to think of it, he had never sung it aloud.

“ _Tonight, remember me in a prayer_  
If you pray them still, and if you could  
Tell the one I love I sleep without a care  
Tell the one I love I left without a care.”

He had always suspected the lullaby was one of those lullabies that tried, hope-against-hope, to make a happy ending out of something unhappy. He had never imagined a happy ending for himself, not like this. Not like he had. Whatever kind of dad he was, he was more than he ever dreamed he’d be.

_“Tell that ancient rider, ‘Come’_  
On his pale horse, in his black hood.  
Tell the one I love I’m coming home  
Tell the one I love I’m coming home.”

The lullaby went on for several more verses, and when he reached the end, Shepard started from the beginning again. Little eyelids grew heavy and fell closed, whimpers turned to deep, sleeping breaths. The weight of his son in his arms anchored him, even as his thoughts spun out into space and back in time. When he had sung it to himself in the Reds, it was a panacea against fear, he had been ready to die. He’d had no loved one to sing it to, then. These kids, asleep at last in his living room, would never know the kind of world where this lullaby was anything other than a quiet little song to lull them to sleep. He and Kaidan had helped to make that world.

He held Shaun tighter. His voice shook less as he continued to sing.

The rest of the night went by without much of a hitch—one or two of the kids waking up to use the bathroom, then bolting right back to sleep in the glow of the firelight.

He didn’t get much sleep, but he must have slept some, because once he opened his eyes and spotted Kaidan staring down at him from upstairs. Never heard the door open. Kaidan gave a gentle wave, and came down the stairs. Shepard stood carefully and navigated around the kids sleeping on the floor, met Kaidan in the kitchen with a kiss.

“How’d it go?”

“I let them tell spooky stories. That was dumb.”

“Oh no.”

“Ended up being okay, though,” he smiled, and Kaidan smiled back at him. Together, they woke the kids up and made everyone breakfast before parents started showing up to take kids home.

It wasn’t long before Shepard was alone in the house—Kaidan gone off to his meeting and Shaun to spend the day at a friend’s house. It was an odd sensation, being alone in the apartment after such a party. It reminded him just the littlest bit of the morning after their Citadel party during the war. Convinced he needed people in his life for the first time. Convinced he wanted to wake up next to Kaidan every day.

Maybe kids weren’t so bad. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad dad.

As he limped up the stairs to take a nap, he got a message from Kaidan.

_“Proud of you. I’ve got nothing going on tomorrow, let’s make tonight special?”_

Shepard smiled, messaged back.

_“Sounds perfect.”_

_“Love you.”_

_“Love you.”_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure who, because it was actual years ago, but someone wanted to see a birthday party, and someone else wanted a story where Shepard just nails being a good dad. So I'm sorry I don't remember who you are, but I hope you enjoyed the story if you found it.
> 
> And thank you to you for reading it. I like to write these very fluffy domestic things, and I know there's not much of an audience. I hope you enjoyed the story!


End file.
